[BRIEF NOTE] Race, intelligence, history

[rfmcdonald]

pompe was the first person on my friends list to report that scientist James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, said that Africans were less intelligent than whites.

One of the world's most eminent scientists was embroiled in an extraordinary row last night after he claimed that black people were less intelligent than white people and the idea that "equal powers of reason" were shared across racial groups was a delusion.

James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA who now runs one of America's leading scientific research institutions, drew widespread condemnation for comments he made ahead of his arrival in Britain today for a speaking tour at venues including the Science Museum in London.

The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when "testing" suggested the contrary. He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.

I've two objections to make to Watson before I can cede the floor to commenters.

1. Back in August 2004, when I was still active on GNXP, I made a post on South African history, outlining how, for nearly a century, the South African state took great care to delay if not prevent the emergence of an educated middle-class non-white population in their country, through the destruction of their urban settlements, the provision of inferior education (when education was provided at all), and the imposition of a racial caste system that worked decidedly to the disadvantage of at least three-quarters of the country's population. After such a history of intentional deprivation, I asked, would anyone be that surprised if black South Africans scored lower on IQ tests than their white counterparts? History--specifically, histories of oppression which would result, among other things, in lower scores on Western-designed tests--is something quite critical that Watson's comments have managed to entirely overlook. One might as well say that Poland disappeared from the map of Europe for nearly a century because of some genetic shortfall among the Slavs and Balts of east-central Europe.

2. In keeping with the theory that homo sapiens sapiens first evolved in Africa, scientists have discovered that African populations are far more genetically diverse than other continental human populations, more genetically diverse than the rest of the humanity put together. This only makes sense since, as the African origins theory predicts, humans have had nearly a hundred thousand years to evolve in situ in different regions of a vast and frequently impassable continent. Talking about West Africans, Congolese, and Ethiopians as belonging to a single population defined by shared genes (as opposed to a population defined by ideology) really doesn't make sense.

Other objections can be made, I'm sure, but I just wanted to make sure that these two got out there.